I generally like sleeping next to The Pedant. I like lying next to him awake, even, and just soaking in the calm furry sleep-energy of him. After we had sex I didn’t feel very tired, but thought I would try reading next to him – a thought that for some stupid reason had never occurred to me before. My headboard has Christmas lights wound around it that I usually turn on for “mood lighting” when I know there will be sex; the lights are bright enough to read by. I went and peed and got a book and clambered back into bed and somehow conked right out before I even started to read. I never fall asleep that fast. I wish it happened more often.

Most of the next day was spent with The Pedant trying to do the device switch on my phone – meaning, copy the contents and settings of my old phone onto one of my laptops so he could then copy it all from there onto my new phone. I suspect it became more of an OCD vendetta with him than an actual interest in helping me – The Bunny had actually managed to transfer my contact list over already, and when the full device switch proved to be a giant pain in the ass I told The Pedant it wasn’t that big a deal, the contacts were switched and that’s the main thing I cared about.

But he stayed the course and I’m not sure if he just didn’t hear or believe me when I said I didn’t care that much and don’t worry about it, or if my opinion had become entirely irrelevant and he was just obsessing. Or maybe he was wanting to figure this shit out because he’s planning on getting a new BlackBerry himself, soon. Probably all three. I felt cared for by it, regardless. And it is nice having all my shit transferred over. I hadn’t fully realized how nice it would be to have all my photos and internet history on the new phone until it happened. 🙂

It was dinnertime by the time I managed to pull The Pedant away and we went to sushi. I ate about a jillion pounds of salmon sashimi, six unagi sushi pieces and a scoop of ice cream, which is exactly what I wanted. Yay for all-you-can-eat! Unagi sushi is a piece of BBQ eel on top of a glob of rice, with a little band of seaweed around the middle. I was like “Oooh, they’re fresh. You know how I know? Because when they get old they pull their seaweed way up high.” It took a second for the comparison of retirees’ hitched-up belts to that wee seaweed strap to click with The Pedant, and then it did and the expression on his face was a satisfying mixture of fondness and facepalm.

The plan had been for The Pedant to head home after dinner; he worked the next day and has to get up absurdly early for that. But as sushi wound to a close he was like “Fuck it, I’m gonna come back to your place and finish figuring out the device transfer. “If you’d like,” I said carefully. I still couldn’t help processing this as devotion to me, and I felt kind of thrilled about it. But I felt bad about him losing sleep and didn’t want to encourage this lest he resent me. I did mention the sleep factor and he pointed out that we’d gotten up at noon and had a nap in the meantime so he’d be okay for sleep (huh. That is not how it works for me…). He said it was the lack of time, not sleep, that would be a bit of an issue for him. Still, he wanted to finish this.

While we were waiting for something or other to download, I realized that The Pedant could help me touch up my hairdo, after all – he’d stated an intention of doing that this visit but we’d gotten distracted. So that worked out well. And the rest of the time that he was waiting for whatever it was to download, we just kinda stood in my bedroom hugging and nuzzling.

By the time he successfully completed the device transfer thingy and left my place, it was around 11pm. It takes him an hour to get home and he wakes up at 4am for work. Ouch. I did tell him all through the day that the device switch wasn’t a big deal to me and not to worry about it, though.

When he left he asked “are you glad I came over?” (He asks things like that a lot. I don’t get it. The words sound like insecurity but nothing else about his demeanour seems insecure…).

I said “You give me the stomach butterflies.”

He said “That’s not stomach butterflies, that’s overexertion of your stomach muscles.” Meaning when I orgasmed.

“Well played,” I said, and we kissed a bunch and then he left.

Before sushi, though, in the middle of all the computer and phone fuckery, I was lying on the bed watching a naked Pedant narrate the technical thing he was doing (and he might as well have been speaking French…) and he took a break to let something download and crawled onto the bed next to me and pulled the covers over us. I love his body so much. There’s a pheromonal magic there that makes him smell and feel like he belongs with me, and any time I come near him (when we’re alone together, anyway; his stance on public displays of affection is inconsistent) he just automatically opens his arms to me and we fit together as naturally as my own two hands meshing fingers.

We were talking about random stuff and the subject of Pixie came up. The Pedant said it was frustrating that she identified as a lesbian for so long and now she’s living with a boyfriend and he never got a shot. “You kinda weren’t missing much,” I said. “She was kind of a starfish in bed, remember.”

“Was it really that bad?” The Pedant asked.

“Yeah, it was…awkward.”

“Too bad I couldn’t have been there to direct you. Like ‘Yeah, now choke her a little bit and when she gets that frightened look…choke her a little bit more!”

I irritatedly told him that I know how to top someone, thankyouverymuch, and Pixie was good about saying what she liked and didn’t like in that respect, anyway. It was the sexual side of things that stymied me. The Pedant opined that he could have helped with that, too, which, again – flat-out hilarious considering I had to send him a brutal email decrying his bedroom skills just to get him to listen to my direct instructions. I refrained from revisiting that whole thing for the twentieth time and just pointed out that he’d be left guessing at what she wanted, same as me. When you ask what someone wants and they just kinda go “I dunno………” then there’s not much you can really do, y’know? He conceded my point.

Thinking about sex and people’s body signals made me realize, “Hey, you haven’t asked me in a long time if I’ve orgasmed. Have you started catching on to the signs?”

“You get a particular timbre to your laugh,” The Pedant said. He means the manic giggles I tend to get after I come.

“That’s…it?” I asked, with disbelief. “Not the breathing or muscle spasms or anything else?”

“Sometimes you’re doing all that stuff but then you end up just telling me you got really close,” The Pedant protested.

I carefully reined in my surge of exasperation: I think The Pedant doesn’t ask me for feedback because he’s afraid of looking dumb, so acting like he’s dumb wouldn’t help. “Okay,” I said. “Let me tell you some things.

“When I’m really close to coming, my breathing gets really fast and shallow. Then when the orgasm hits, muscle spasms in my stomach kind of pull my shoulders off the bed rhythmically -” I rolled from our snuggle onto my back and pantomimed the motion – “and my breathing turns into deep gasps that follow that same rhythm. Also my Kegel muscles flex in a way that I can’t do on purpose. If I squeeze my insides on purpose, I can only do it like this – ” I squeezed his forearm with my whole hand, uniformly – “but when I orgasm…I guess there are actually two different sets of muscles up in there? And they flex in a ripple effect.” I squeezed his forearm with ripply-fingers.

“Pet my back,” I said, and rolled another half-turn so I was facing away from him. He complied, and I remembered MOAR THINGS: “Oh, but also, I have to sorta flex my stomach muscles in order to bring on an orgasm. Don’t confuse this with the thing my stomach does when I actually come. To bring on an orgasm I do basically one long stomach crunch with my hips pushed upward. The orgasm spasms are rhythmic, and I think kind of lift my hips up but mostly what I notice is my shoulders being pulled up off the mattress over and over.”

Sooner or later The Pedant gently urged me with his hands to roll back over and face him. “I sometimes get so caught up in maintaining whatever stimulation I’m giving someone that it’s hard for me to notice what their body is doing,” I said soothingly, by way of excusing him still not recognizing my orgasms. I think it happens to everyone.” I rolled to face him and he rolled from his back to face me and started kissing me and that’s when I saw in my peripheral vision that he was hard. I would like to think that the thought of me coming had turned him on, but it may just have been our physical proximity and nakedness. Either way I was totally down for some action. And it was nice to have him initiate for a change.

Eventually, predictably, I ended up on top of him. While I straddled and kissed him he reached between us and blindly fumbled his cock into position – god, I love the urgency of that gesture – and I slid the rest of the way down around him. I pinned his arms over his head manually since he’d left no time for restraints. As he got close to coming he struggled fitfully against my grip, but not in any serious way (he just likes to feel restrained; he likes that bit of pushback) and I had my weight leaned on his wrists so he was securely anchored. And his orgasm was epic and it made my brain have orgasm chemicals, too. I wish I could spontaneously get the crotch-feelings of orgasm the way I can spontaneously get the brain part. But things were awfully intense as it was.

The second I freed his arms, The Pedant pulled my head down onto his shoulder. Odd how he was all about the eye contact during fucking a time or two ago and this visit it was like “nooooooo I’m coming DON’T LOOK AT MEEEEE.” But that’s okay because the sex had really scrambled my brain and I felt too vulnerable to look in his eyes, either. I just stayed curled up on him with my face mashed into his chest, trying not to have a big mushy “OMG I feel so close to you” cry. Every time his cock did little aftershock twitchies inside me it made me shudder and utter an involuntary little squeaking noise.

The Pedant’s lack of I-love-yous really started to frustrate me at that point. Because I wanted to say it to him. It had been on the tip of my tongue for most of his visit, and especially right then after the sex. Words of Affirmation are one of my primary love languages – I need to express my mushy thoughts to people I care about. And I feel like I probably shouldn’t drop too many I-love-you’s on him because he’ll interpret it as pressure to say it back. That’s not the main reason I wanna say it. The main reason I wanna say it is just…because I want to. Because the feeling fills up my chest until I think I’ll burst if I don’t vent some of it. When I’ve said it, though, he’s basically totally ignored it. Didn’t pull away from me, but didn’t hold me tighter in an encouraging/acknowledging way, either. Which seems like he’s not disgusted by my love, but kind of doesn’t want to hear about it, either.

So mostly my exasperation here is just that I feel I have to stifle myself. But I’d be lying if I said that hearing the words from him didn’t matter to me. I’d like to have that verbal confirmation of his feelings, and I can’t understand why he can’t do that. I’ve said I love you to him on three or four occasions now, so it’s not like there’s any emotional risk for him, here. And the first time I told him I loved him – hilariously enough in a breakup email – he told me he was feeling it back (without using the actual words, just “the feelings are being reciprocated,” but still) sooooo what’s the problem here? He managed to at least choke out a “me too” that one time; why never again? (My asshole anxiety brain is whispering to me, “Maybe he loved you then but not anymore…maybe he constantly does sweet things for you because he feels guilty for not loving you back…” but the tiny vestige of sanity left in me insists that this isn’t true. The loving vibes were pouring off him when we were together. There’s no mistaking them.)

Anyway. Other highlights of the visit:

At one point while he was (once again) standing in my bedroom watching something download on my laptop, I came up and started kissing him and running my hands over him. He was dressed, so this must have been after the sushi when he came back just to finish up the technical stuff…he said “I’m afraid I’m quite spent right now.”

“I assumed that,” I said. “I’m not always gunning for sex every time I touch you, you know. …But if you do happen to get in the mood…”

He chuckled and said “I knew you’d say that.” So he knows that I’m basically always up for sex with him. I suppose he’s confusing “always receptive” with “always wanting.” A lot of the time I really am content just to touch him, truly. But when he gets in the mood for fucking and my touches make him start to moan, I’ll want to run with it. That’s all.

“I can’t help it!” I said. “Your cock is beautiful and it fits inside me like it was made for me.” And The Pedant chuckled bashfully and pulled me close so I couldn’t see his expression (except I did catch a glimpse: pleased and embarrassed and sort of awed).

Also shortly before sushi, when we were still naked but about to get dressed and go out, I craved the feel of his naked body one more time. I was lying on the bed with my legs over the edge and he was standing; I used my feet to hook his legs and bring him closer, then wrapped my legs around his ass and pulled him down so he was lying on top of me. His weight and skin and fur felt so good on me, like ointment on a burn I didn’t know I had. “I kind of assume you’re still spent from last time, but if you want to fuck again, we totally can…just putting that out there.” The Pedant said he didn’t have it in him at the moment.

At some other point – maybe this was on the first night – we were lying in my bed and talking about our families and stuff. The Pedant has a habit of talking trash about people for having traits (or reactions or behaviours or habits) similar to mine, and when I point out that he’s basically describing me he tries to say that no, I’m not like that because [thin, implausible reasons]. I used to fear that The Pedant didn’t see me as I really am, and that once he realized what I’m actually like he would bail on me. Now I think it’s that The Pedant just talks trash because he’s trying to sound all cool and jaded, and when I’m like “…Dude? You know you might as well be saying that about me, right?” he back-pedals. He doesn’t want to say that he was just spouting bullshit to sound cool though (maybe he doesn’t consciously know he does that) so his only other “out” is to move the goalposts and claim that I don’t fit the thing he’s bitching about.

So anyway I was telling The Pedant how my downstairs neighbour has screaming fights with her bf all the time and it makes me scared to do my laundry (the machines are right outside their door) because when I was growing up my dad had similar tantrums and if I even accidentally made eye contact, all his rage would transfer onto me. The rule was to stay out of his way.

The Pedant said “He just didn’t have any control, I guess.”

“That’s what my mom always said, but I call bullshit. Because guess what? He managed never to scream at me in front of other people who might have called Children’s Aid on him. He managed never to punch a hole in the wall next to his boss’ head. He somehow only ever ‘lost control’ on people who had no power to do anything about it. Funny coincidence, huh?”

The Pedant said something like “People who can control things when they need to but otherwise let things go to hell should be put in straitjackets and left to die.”

“Um. I’m a person who can control things, to an extent, but doesn’t always. When I really, really need to, I can get past my anxiety and depression and get things done. But the rest of the time everything gets fucked up and I can’t seem to do anything about it.”

“Not the same at all,” The Pedant said. “You‘ve managed to hold down a job and keep your apartment. Some people don’t.” Which…was actually my point? I can control myself well enough to be not-homeless, and that’s it. Also, The Pedant hadn’t been dissing people who are homeless or jobless, he’d been dissing people with issues they can control sometimes but not others.

I didn’t bother spotlighting his logical inconsistencies. I know that he was just trying, in his own clumsy way, to say that my dad sucks and that I don’t.

As soon as we got back to my place after sushi, The Pedant checked his wallet and started musing out loud that he was really low on cash and doesn’t get paid till next week. He’s said similar things to me before and I just said “that sucks” and moved on to a different topic and he didn’t pursue it further, and he’s not normally a hinter, so I can’t tell if this is him making conversation in a weird way or him angling for a loan.

At any rate I do have a little wad of cash from some modelling sessions, so this time around I asked him if he needed me to top him up. He said $25 would really help him out. I gave him $30. I’m befuddled by this whole exchange because he’d just taken me out to dinner and my portion of it actually probably did cost about $25. I’m not saying he was backhandedly making me pay for my meal; I don’t believe that at all. But I sorta wonder if he knew he was almost broke before we even went out, but found it less awkward to hint at a loan after dinner than it would have been to tell me “I know I promised you sushi but I can’t do it, after all.”

But yeah. I’m a cheap bastard and I’m fairly unimpressed at essentially paying for a meal that I was supposed to have been treated to, but this is a boy who:

Has bought me countless meals

Bought an old laptop off me and gave me more money than I’d asked for it

Gave me an old digital camera when mine finally died

Gave me his old, perfectly salable BlackBerry and would have given me another if I hadn’t just bought my own

Has told me he’ll give me money at some point to put toward the new BlackBerry because he knows the expenditure kinda freaks me out (he’s vaguely talked about giving me money before for various things and not done it, but I believe that he makes these offers sincerely and I’m touched by his sweetness)

Has bought me groceries when he knew I was particularly poor

Has given me a lot of free tech support

Has outright asked me for money once ever (oddly, also right after buying me something…dude maybe doesn’t manage his finances terribly well).

So I gave him a bit more money than he asked for, and I will not be asking for it back. Still, as The Pedant tucked it into his wallet he said he’d pick up a new, bigger memory card for my new phone sometime soon. He probably would have done that anyway – he’s generous and helpful like that – but I think he was making a point at that moment of telling me he’d repay me one way or another without directly saying it. If he forgets, I won’t pursue it.

I feel like I had more to say, but I’m tired. Maybe other things will come to me later.